North American realms are currently offline for their 12 hour maintenance to update retail realms to patch 3.0.2 support, at the same time forcing all users to download and install a 1.2GB patch in order to continue playing. You are asked to NOT download this patch if you wish to continue playing on EchelonedWoW. Support for patch 3.0.2 will not be here for at least several weeks or months. Many changes have occurred in the transition from 2.4.3 to 3.0.2; it will be a fair while before any stable production server is able to run without a guaranteed crash.

I have included instructions to avoid patching or to run two clients in 2.4.3 (for emulation servers) and 3.0.2 (for retail). It should be noted as of patch 3.0.2 the realmlist.wtf file has been relocated to the Data\enUS subfolder (or whatever your locale is) in a bid to further detriment private servers.

TO AVOID AUTOMATIC PATCH DOWNLOAD:
1) Navigate to your World of Warcraft root directory.
2) Delete or rename launcher.exe.
3) Open realmlist.wtf and ensure the set patchlist... line is deleted.
4) Run World of Warcraft with the wow.exe executable.

TO RUN TWO CLIENTS, ONE PATCHED TO 2.4.3 AND THE OTHER PATCHED TO 3.0.2
1) Navigate to the directory containing the World of Warcraft folder.
2) Copy and paste the folder.
3) Choose one folder to remain patched to 2.4.3 and one to patch to 3.0.2.
4) Follow TO AVOID AUTOMATIC PATCH DOWNLOAD instructions above for the 2.4.3 installation.

I HAVE ALREADY PATCHED...
1) Reinstall World of Warcraft or download the 2.4.3 client via http://seattle.servers.echelonedwow.net/WoWClient2-4-3enUS.rar (7.79GB).
2) The client is a full installation of 2.4.3 so just extract the files and you're set to play EchelonedWoW! No installation required; hit wow.exe and run (all the steps above to avoid automatic patching are set).

Discussion of this article at http://forums.echelonedwow.net/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=2447.

Do you find the boring Donor-Min broadcasting in .admintalk ruining your roleplay? Perhaps that new player asking for help is irritating you - or maybe there's a spammer that hasn't been banned yet. On those occasions don't you wish you could just turn off server-wide broadcasts? Well, now you can!

EchelonedWoW is pleased to announce two new commands added to the arsenal of all players on realms #1 and #2! With the rolling restarts the two realms experienced, .disableannounce allows any player to turn off server-wide broadcasts so that they will not see anything that is sent into world chat! Should they ever wish to rejoin this channel it's a simple matter of typing .enableannounce. The usage of these commands are account wide and permanent, so once it's switched off it's off until you re-enable it!

Coupled with http://forums.echelonedwow.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2132, this is all you need to ensure those gatecrashers can never disturb you again!

*#1 has not been updated with these commands yet. The realm will be brought down during off-peak hours instead. Discussion of this article at http://forums.echelonedwow.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2153.

It has come to my attention that players don't want to vote because there is no incentive. To combat this, I will set a goal for all of you: If we make it to rank 25 on Xtremetop100 and stay around the 20-30 mark until September 1, I will give every unique player the chance to add one of their own custom items to the database for either #1 or #2.

The choice of voting is yours and we do not require that you vote to play on our servers. Why do we want votes then? The answer is always the same: to bring in more players. Our ultimate goal is to produce one large community of players and to do that we have to vote and promote the server! This doesn't mean simply vote for Xtremetop100 and leave it there though, for both WoW-V, Gtop and MMORPGTOP200 also generate their fair share in hits.

It takes five seconds to vote at Xtremetop100, five seconds to vote at WoW-V and five seconds to vote at Gtop. That's 15 seconds or a quarter of a minute. It's not much of your life, so please spend 15 seconds of your life every 12 hours voting for EchelonedWoW!